LiteLLM vs TrueFoundry
Both are llm gateways tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
LiteLLM
The most widely adopted open-source LLM gateway, MIT licensed with 100+ provider integrations and zero markup on your tokens. The catch is that you operate it, and published enterprise pricing is wildly inconsistent.
TrueFoundry
An enterprise AI gateway fronting 250+ models with on-prem deployment and a free developer tier. Worth knowing that it also publishes the competitor pricing guides that rank highly for its rivals' names.
| LiteLLM | TrueFoundry | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Our rating | 5/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | $0 self-hosted | $499/mo |
| Billing meter | No usage metering | request |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | Yes, free | No or paid tier only |
| Best for | Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant. | Enterprises that need an AI gateway deployable on-premise or in their own cloud with governance features, and that want a managed product rather than operating open-source infrastructure. |
Our verdict on LiteLLM
LiteLLM is the default open-source LLM gateway and deserves to be. It is MIT licensed, fronts 100+ providers behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and takes no markup on your tokens - which is the decisive difference at any real volume, because managed alternatives charge a percentage of everything you spend forever. Adopting it is largely a base URL change, and so is leaving, which is an unusually honest position for infrastructure to be in. The cost is operational rather than financial. You run the proxy, the database, the monitoring and the upgrades, which realistically means a few hundred dollars a month of infrastructure and a person who owns it. Releases are frequent enough that pinning to stable versions is advisable. The one genuinely unsatisfying part is enterprise pricing, where third-party sources disagree so wildly - from $250 a month to around $30,000 a year - that none of them can be trusted, and enterprise SSO being free only up to five users means identity management turns into a commercial conversation sooner than you might expect.
Full LiteLLM review →Our verdict on TrueFoundry
TrueFoundry is a credible enterprise AI gateway with one capability that genuinely distinguishes it - it deploys on-premise and in your own cloud, not just as SaaS. For regulated organisations that cannot route prompts through a third party but also do not want to own an open-source proxy outright, that middle position is valuable and few competitors occupy it. Native MCP support and semantic caching are both ahead of most of the field, and the free Developer tier at 50,000 requests a month is a real trial. The company looks solid, having raised over $21 million from Intel Capital, Eniac Ventures and Peak XV, appeared in Gartner's 2026 Hype Cycle for Platform Engineering, and acquired Seldon AI. One thing worth knowing as a reader rather than a buyer. TrueFoundry publishes detailed pricing guides for LiteLLM, Portkey, LangChain and others, and those articles rank well for competitor searches. They are reasonable content, but they are competitor marketing, and if you have been researching gateway pricing you have probably read several without noticing whose site you were on.
Full TrueFoundry review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between LiteLLM and TrueFoundry?
LiteLLM: Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant. TrueFoundry: Enterprises that need an AI gateway deployable on-premise or in their own cloud with governance features, and that want a managed product rather than operating open-source infrastructure. Both sit in LLM Gateways, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, LiteLLM or TrueFoundry?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - LiteLLM bills on no usage metering and TrueFoundry bills on request. Published starting prices are $0 self-hosted and $499/mo respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host LiteLLM or TrueFoundry?
LiteLLM: Yes, free. TrueFoundry: No or paid tier only. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.